1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to delivering targeted coupons. More specifically, this disclosure is related to determining whether an end-user is eligible to receive a digital coupon without revealing sensitive information about the end-user or the vendor's targeting strategy.
2. Related Art
Advancements in mobile computing have made it possible for people to increase their level of interaction with their mobile devices. These mobile devices can connect to the Internet, they can obtain detailed information about the user (e.g., location information, user profile information, social-networking information, etc.), and they can include a high-resolution display for presenting rich content to the user. Further, applications installed in these mobile devices can use this detailed information about the user to provide specific services to the user. Many of these applications can be installed for free, and may periodically display a coupon as a source of revenue.
However, many users have developed an acute sense of which advertisements or coupons are relevant to their interests, and are likely to ignore coupons that are not relevant to their lifestyle. Further, vendors are often more interested in offering coupons to users that are likely to become loyal routine customers. Therefore, a vendor can provide coupons that are directed to certain users based on behavior information about the user. For example, some businesses may desire to provide a digital coupon to users that have performed a certain action (e.g., recently visited a competitor's Web page). However, to determine whether the user has performed the desired actions, these advertising networks need to obtain personal user information from the user's personal computing device, and not all users feel comfortable releasing their personal behavior information.
Further, users oftentimes limit the information that an advertising network can obtain about them, which can prevent the advertising network from selecting the most-relevant coupons for these users. To appease the privacy-sensitive end-users, some advertising networks promote a privacy-preserving advertisement targeting system that analyzes a user's personal information at his personal computing device. These targeting systems select a targeted advertisement from a group of candidate advertisements, without releasing the selection results to the advertisement server. Unfortunately, performing the targeting algorithm on the user's computing device can reveal the advertiser's trade secrets. These advertising systems cannot be used to provide targeted coupons because it is possible for a user to access the targeting criteria, and to generate fake user information in order to obtain the desired coupon.